Echoes of Earth

by Sean Williams

  She accepted the explanation. “So what’s your interest in this situation?”

  “I’d like to talk to Peter. I think I can help him.”

  “How?”

  “He needs someone to keep his mind on track. You and Jayme have other things to do. I’m on real time, like him, and he’ll listen to me.”

  Hatzis mulled over Samson’s suggestion. It seemed to make sense. They wouldn’t want Alander distracted at a crucial point in the proceedings. But she also didn’t want him distracted by Samson, either.

  “Okay,” she said, “we’ll give you the bandwidth.”

  “ConSense?”

  “Yes. He doesn’t like hearing voices in his head.”

  “Good.” Samson smiled openly, making her seem even younger than she already was.

  Christ, thought Hatzis. What does she see in him? They were opposites in almost every respect: she a pale-complexioned blond in her thirties, he a rejuvenated sixty-year-old, formerly mixed African/Cuban stock but now in the body of a vat-grown android barely six months old. More importantly, she was still in possession of all of her faculties, while he—

  Give it a rest, Hatzis chided herself, tiring of her own maligning of Alander.

  “I’ll allow this only on the condition that he actually wants you there,” she said. “The minute he asks for you to leave, you’re gone. Understood?”

  Samson nodded. “Understood.”

  “Okay.” She brought Sivio up to speed and gave permission for the line to Alander to be opened. The conSense link was a small risk, but a meaningless one if what Alander had said about the Spinners being able to access the Tipler was really true.

  She didn’t stick around to listen in on the conversation. There was far too much work to be done for her to afford to be able to just hang about eavesdropping. She had her projections team concentrate their efforts on the fifth tower and spindle, in order to anticipate what Alander might find there. She didn’t want him going in there blind, despite her feelings toward the man.

  Engineering reported that they could guarantee constant satellite coverage of the spindle with only a dozen or so orbital maneuvers. She okayed the procedures; as long as the Tipler was safely out of the way, she was prepared to risk a few minor satellites in order to increase surveillance.

  The issue of alien versus human origins of the Spinners wasn’t going away in a hurry, despite Alander’s beliefs on the subject. Certainly, the pictures filtering through spoke of massive capability. Such architecture required enormous material strength and a high degree of engineering sophistication, but none of it rang false to her. The angles and planes displayed an appreciable aesthetic, as she understood it. There were three ways to explain it: Architecture throughout the universe followed similar rules; the builders came from the same place she did; or the builders made the spindles the way they did in order to meet human aesthetics, not their own. The first possibility struck her as being unlikely, as did the last, but she was unsure if that reasoning alone justified accepting the second possibility.

  Spindle Five consisted of a central, seed-shaped structure approximately one-half kilometer in height. The orbital tower connecting it to the ground was anchored in a slight tapering at its bottom, similar in reverse to the counterweight on the far side. The orbital ring seemed to pass through the entire structure unhindered, vanishing on one side into a deep dimple only to reappear on the other in exactly the same fashion. Apart from that, there were no obvious openings in the central structure’s surface; it was apparently smooth all over.

  Surrounding it, however, were seventeen freestanding rings, like streamers encircling a Christmas tree, though never actually touching the branches. They kept a minimum 100-meter distance from the central “seed” and were spaced equally apart around it. From edge to edge, they were ten meters wide and three meters thick. All of them were irregularly dotted with slight, rectangular indentations that the projections team suspected might be windows or airlocks, although none of them were open.

  Electromagnetic emissions were minimal. The entire structure uniformly reflected a slight bronze light, but there were no lights, no radars, no lasers. For all Hatzis and her crew could tell, the structure could have been completely dead. But the cable car suggested otherwise.

  “Could it really be so easy, though?” she mused aloud.

  “Could what be so easy?” asked Sivio.

  She looked at him and shook her head. “Sorry,” she said, slightly embarrassed for having voiced her thought. “I just can’t shake the feeling that there’s something else going on. Something we’re not seeing.”

  “You think it’s a test?”

  “Think, no. Fear, yes.” What had Alander called it? A rabbit trap. She found herself hoping more than she had ever hoped for anything that he was wrong.

  “He’s preparing to move off again,” said Sivio. “I can tell him to hold off a little longer, if you like.”

  She briefly considered waiting another hour or so to see if the Spinners would make a move. But what would the point of that be? If Alander was right, then they were listening in and would know what they were doing anyway.

  “No, it’s okay,” she said. “Tell him he can go whenever he’s ready.”

  Sivio went off to confer with Alander, and this time she followed him to see how the human representative to the Spinners was faring.

  Alander’s image, based on scans taken from the interior of the shuttle, looked tired. His artificial body possessed the same basic chemistry as a natural human, plus a few modifications designed to make survival easier in the difficult environments found on Adrasteia. It was ironic, she thought, that their mental states should share a common feeling of fatigue despite neither of them having a genuine body. How far we have come, she thought, yet how unchanged we remain.

  “I’m ready to leave, Caryl.” For all his appearance, Alander sounded alert.

  “Are you sure?”

  Alander nodded. “The sooner we get this over with, the better.”

  “Sounds like you’re having second thoughts.”

  “Try third or fourth,” he quipped humorlessly. “I’m terrified, if that’s what you want to hear, Caryl.”

  “If you’d told me you weren’t, I wouldn’t have believed you.”

  He instructed the autopilot to resume its journey to the base of Tower Five. Nothing was said as the burn began, and silence reigned until the craft was cruising rapidly above Adrasteia’s swirling cloud layer.

  “Answer me one question,” Hatzis asked him. “Where did you get the shuttle overrides from?”

  Alander didn’t hesitate. “I’ve always known them.”

  “Really? They’re supposed to be top secret.”

  He smiled. “I can’t explain it. My original knew them, so I do, too. I never expected to need them, but they were there if I did.”

  “What other overrides do you know, Peter?”

  “I’d hate to say, really. You’ll just change them.”

  “You’re damn right I would.”

  “Why, Caryl? It’s not as if I’m going to use them to harm the mission. I haven’t so far; why should I now?”

  “That’s a moot point, Peter. I’m still not happy about the way you’ve handled yourself in the last few hours. How do I know you won’t subvert my authority again next time we disagree on something?”

  “You don’t,” he admitted. “But you must know that it would take more than a simple spat for me to use them. We’ve had plenty of those in recent weeks, and I’ve managed to avoid the temptation.”

  True enough, she thought, but she still didn’t like it.

  Switching to a private channel, she sent a brief message to Sivio: “Still think I’m paranoid for worrying about a company spy?”

  “Less so, now, I must admit.” His tone wasn’t entirely serious. “If Alander is the plant, though, they miscalculated rather badly.”

  Hatzis thought back to the rumors she had heard during entrainment and preflight
preparations: that on each of the missions, one crew member had been subtly altered in order to make them a dupe for UNESSPRO back home. Each plant had been preprogrammed to respond to certain stimuli in order to ensure that the missions ran the way the survey protocol demanded. But no one knew exactly what those stimuli might be, and no one could name who might be affected by the subconscious programming. Indeed, the most sinister rumor ran that a different crew member was chosen for each mission, so that if Peter Alander was the plant for the Frank Tipler, it might be Ali Genovese on the Frank Drake, or Caryl Hatzis on the Andre Linde. The plants themselves might not even know until the right circumstances occurred and the programming sprang into life.

  The worst thing was that she could see how it made sense. There was no other way the UNESSPRO managers could oversee the program once the probes left. This was their only way to protect against such catastrophes as mutinies, she supposed.

  But if Alander was the plant, why would he become active now? If anything, he was provoking dissent, not discouraging it.

  Maybe the failure of his engram lay at the heart of that mystery. Or not. As he himself had said, there had been plenty of opportunities for him to defy her in the past. Maybe his original had earned the respect of the other generalists by being smart enough to steal the overrides from UNESSPRO’s programmers and not use them until he’d had no other choice.

  Or perhaps he was right, and the Spinners were into everything. Maybe they had hacked directly into his mind and put the overrides there, along with the urge to use them, to go the tower. She was beyond being surprised by their actions, whoever they were. Although their adopted name suited them, given the manner in which they had appeared, spinning their threads like shining interstellar weevils, she couldn’t help but think of spiders instead: giant, malign intelligences drawing the human surveyors into a web they couldn’t even see.

  1.1.7

  “What are you thinking, Peter?”

  Cleo Samson’s voice brought Alander out of his deep reflection.

  “That it shouldn’t be me,” he said.

  “Visiting the Spinners, you mean?”

  “Yeah.” The shuttle was back on course, buffeting in the steadily worsening turbulence. “It should have been Lucia.”

  There was a slight pause. He felt Samson’s illusory body shift next to his in the darkness. The sensation insinuated itself into his mind with such intimacy that for a moment he was uncertain what she was even doing there. Had they had sex, he plugged into conSense and she immersed in her virtual world, thousands of kilometers away? And if so, how had she convinced him to do that, with everyone watching?

  But a second later the fear passed. There was no way, he realized, that he would have agreed to it, although it might have explained his state of mind.

  “It should have been Lucia,” he repeated solemnly. “Not me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she was trained for this sort of thing. She’s used to working alone. And she’s willing to take risks I would judge unreasonable. She’s...” It was his turn to pause. “She’s a survivor, I guess.”

  “Even risk-takers fail eventually, Peter.”

  “What are you trying to say, Cleo?” he said irritably. “And what the hell are you doing here, anyway? Trying to lift my morale? Because if you are, you’re doing a piss-poor job of it, I can tell you.”

  “I just don’t think you should feel guilty about her, that’s all.”

  “I don’t feel guilty, Cleo.”

  “I think you do, Peter.”

  “That’s crap. Why should I? It wasn’t my decision. It was up to the assignment board.”

  “But you recommended her.”

  “So did you. We all did.”

  “But only you were sleeping with her.”

  “That’s irrelevant!”

  “No, it’s not,” she said. “Your emotions precluded you from being able to look at her objectively, as the rest of us were able to do. It was the right decision, Peter. Your personal attachment just doesn’t allow you to see that right now.”

  “I know it was the right decision, Cleo.” His tone started angry but was quickly tempered by the realization that what she was saying was true. “I just miss her sometimes, you know? She... Lucia...” The image of her was clear in his artificial recollection; he felt as though he could touch her if he reached out a hand. And with the right cross-matching of memory and sensory input, he was sure that he could have touched her—in the false world of conSense. “Lucia loved the unknown and the unpredictable. To deny her that would have been wrong. Not that I could have talked her out of it even had I tried. She was too strong willed. And that’s why I wish she was here now. She’d do a good job, I know, whereas I—”

  He shut his mouth on words he didn’t want to say aloud. Thinking them was bad enough.

  I’m probably going to fuck it up.

  That’s what Caryl Hatzis was thinking, he was sure. And who was he to argue with her? The bath debacle was just the recent in a string of blunders, each worse than the last. Maybe he did have a death wish, deep down.

  “You might not know this, but I envied Lucia.” Cleo’s normally rough alto was soft. “Not just over you, but her brief, too. I realized it was dangerous and could even turn out to be deadly boring, but at least she had a chance to find something of her own. Not as a faceless chemist in a group of other faceless technicians. Everything she discovered would be unique to her. No one else would share that experience. Something like that is priceless. I’ve come to appreciate that after so long among our collective.”

  Alander listened to Samson, startled by her words. He had imagined Lucia’s journey that way himself: a mind in a box riding the torch of an interstellar drive, little more than sensors and shielding and a large amount of antimatter called Chung-2. Most of the minor stars between Sol and Upsilon Aquarius had been hers to fly by, slowing fractionally enough to take pictures but never stopping. What would she see? What strange sights would be hers and hers alone to enjoy?

  He had thought of it that way but had never spoken to Cleo Samson about it. Why would he? He had never known that she envied Lucia the mission. He had never really considered that someone other than he might grieve for what Lucia’s failure amounted to: not just a hitch in the overall survey plan, but the failure of a dream.

  Chung-2 should’ve been waiting for them at Adrasteia, chock-full of data. It hadn’t been there, and they had neither seen it nor received a signal from it in the year they had waited. Officially, she was assumed dead and her mission a failure, knocked out perhaps by a stray particle in interstellar space or maybe something more substantial closer to one of her targets. Either way, if she had seen anything new, it was lost with her.

  And she was lost to him. That was what had obsessed his thoughts upon arriving at Upsilon Aquarius. That, and losing his mind.

  “Do you still envy her?” he asked Samson.

  She laughed lightly. “Do I envy being dead? No. And I don’t envy being considered expendable by UNESSPRO, which must have been a factor in their decision. The Tipler functions perfectly well without her, even if she is missed.”

  He nodded. As much he hated to admit it, that was probably true. She was like he had been, spread thin across a large number of disciplines with little depth in any. The perfect person to send alone into the void, to face whatever the universe felt like throwing at her.

  He wondered how many of her other engrams had also failed in their missions, just as he had wondered how many of his had suffered breakdowns similar to his own. Perhaps they were doomed to miss each other wherever they went, jinxed by the send-off their originals had given them back on Earth.

  His train of thought was broken as the shuttle banked steeply and began to descend.

  “It’s not too late to change your mind,” said Caryl Hatzis over the open line.

  “I know that,” he replied. “But I’m not going to.” I’m doing this because I want to, not just because I have to. If
I can’t be myself any longer, maybe I can try being someone else for a change.

  ConSense maintained the illusion that Samson was squashed in the cargo hold with him as the shuttle shuddered down toward the ground. Her body bounced with his, one hand on his forearm as if for support. He knew better than to try to hold onto her, however; the moment he tried—and failed, since she wasn’t really there—he would lose all pretense of balance. He didn’t know if his new body could suffer from motion sickness, but it wasn’t something he particularly wanted to find out at this stage.

  Sitting silently in the darkness, he rode the silent descent out as patiently as he could. At that point in time, he was little more than freight; if something disastrous happened to the shuttle, he figured he’d be better off not knowing, because there was little he could do to avoid it. Right now his fate lay in the hands of the autopilot and, possibly, whoever was responsible for the towers. If they had wanted him to come in the first place, then it was likely they would want to ensure his safe passage also. And he had no doubt they would have the technology to be able to do just that.

  Interesting, he suddenly thought, how we put faith in the unknown when our lives are most at risk

  When the faint whine of the shuttle’s engines peaked in volume and the descent slowed to a halt, he felt almost disappointed. The moment of truth had come.

  He sat up. “We’re down?”

  “Yes.” The autopilot was brisk and to the point, as ever.

  “What are conditions like outside?”

  “I am displaying atmospheric data—”

  “Just tell me.”

  “Ambient temperature is 180 Adjusted Planck degrees Kelvin. Wind speed is atypically high for the equator as a result of atmospheric disturbances to the east. There is a significant amount of suspended particulate debris still circulating—”

  “You mean dust?”

  “—from the building of the artifact in our vicinity. Yes, I mean dust.”

  “Great.” He pulled the hood of his environment suit up over his head and sealed it at his throat, not just against the dust. One hundred and eighty K was warmer than he had expected but still below freezing. “What’s the approximate time out there?”